Benquo,
You are right. I misread it. The first case is one of irrationality.
Benquo,
You are right. I misread it. The first case is one of irrationality.
Oh, tsk tsk. But women with “creationist” brains just don’t have the sort of one night stands implied by your story, at least not as often as the ones with “evolutionary” brains, :-).
As someone whose parents knew Einstein as well as some other major “geniuses,” such as Godel and von Neumann, I have long heard about the personal flaws of these people and their human foibles. Einstein was notoriously wrong about a number of things, most famously, quantum mechanics, although there is still research being done based on questions that he raised about it. It is also a fact that a number of other people had many of the insights into both special and general relativity, with him engaging in a virtual race with Hilbert for general relativity that he barely won. Quite a few had the basic ideas for special relativity, including Poincare, but just never quite put it all together.
What is actually more amazing about Einstein’s genuine achievements, is that not only was he a patent clerk in 1905, his “miracle year,” when he was unable to get an academic position, but for some period of time before that he could not even get any sort of job at all. Continuing to work creatively and innovatively in such an environment did take a special degree of ingenuity, insight, and sheer self-confidence, not to mention good luck. Of course, it can be argued, as some have, that it was precisely this outsider position that allowed him to make his conceptual breakthroughs, that he was at his best when he was a patent clerk in Berne, and that once he found general relativity and achieved fame and prominent professorships, his productivity and innovativess fell way off, although perhaps it was the overly comfortable existence he was provided with by his second wife, who also was more willing to overlook some of his peccadilloes, such as his constant pursuit of other women, although apparently she could not abide a certain Austrian princess who used to leave her underwear behind on the family boat.
Regarding calculus, it is possible to accept infinitesimals and thus view dx/dy as meaningful in an absolute sense, and not just as the outcome of a limit process. This is what is done in nonstandard analysis, in which infinitesimals are the reciprocals of superreal numbers that are infinite (although not equal to or equivalent to the infinite cardinals). This is in fact how both Newton and Leibniz thought of the matter. For Leibniz, a monad was a point surrounded by infinitesimals.
However, while infinitesimals are smaller than any positive real number, they are not equal to zero, strictly speaking. Therefore, they are irrelevant to the discussion of the steps in the Heinlein exercise, which is dealing with the actual zero. Indeed, this exercise is a reminder as to why dividing by zero is ruled out. Allowing it allows absurdities such as this exercise. 0⁄0 can be anything.
My late father was once asked by a young woman in the audience at one of his public lectures, “Is zero a real number?” He replied, “one of the finests, my dear, one of the finest.”
Eliezer,
Gould makes his own mea culpas near the end of the chapter, so you can focus on that zone. Tooby is not an unreasonable guy, and it may well be that Gould’s criticism of him was off-base. I have not read that particular exchange.
Let me put Gould in a slightly different frame. He was not the JK Galbraith of evolutionary theory, as Krugman bought into. He was probably closer to being the Milton Friedman, if on the opposite side of the political fence.
Friedman (like Dawkins also) was a great popularizer and author of best-selling books, like Gould and Galbraith. However, unlike Galbraith, he did win a Nobel Prize in economics, which most accept was deserved, even those who do not like Friedman’s politics. He is also in all the intro texts, just like Gould, but unlike Galbraith. Even so, there are some, his worst critics, who have always been extremely critical of him, often in very hyperbolic terms and language. Also, he has been proven wrong about some things which he was closely associated with, notably hard core monetarism (he agreed last summer that central banks should not focus on money supply anymore, an ultimately reasonable guy, like Gould).
Nobels are not given out for evolutionary theory, although geneticists get them sometimes (Crick, Watson). So, Mayr, Simpson, Williams, Maynard Smith (he might have gotten an econ one), and other giants did not get one. If they were given, Gould would have gotten one. It is very simple. Whatever his many faults, and they were many, he came up with what has been the single biggest new idea (yes, one can find hints of it in Darwin and some others) in evolutionary theory of the last half century, punctuated equilibrium, now in all the textbooks, just like the most important ideas of Milton Friedman (and unlike Galbraith’s major ideas). There are some who say it is wrong, but most say that it is at least partly right. So, Gould was very big and very important, even if he pissed a lot of people off.
Eliezer,
Well, let me see. Where shall I start?
Tooby is not an evolutionary biologist or population geneticist. He is an evolutionary psychologist. This screed from 1997 is about half a whine about Gould’s treatment of some of his work. Perhaps the whine is justified, but it is a whine, and most of the rest of it is off-base. The argument about inverted panadaptationism is simply wrong, as a perusal of Gould’s 1400 page plus magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, will tell. BTW, Tooby does not make it into the 43 page bibliography of that book, although Williams is discussed at great length and with great respect in it. I would note also that Williams altered his views somewhat between 1966 and his 1992 book. (Just for the record, I like the main book by Cosmides and Tooby.)
Krugman? Excuse me. He admits himself that he does not know much about evolutionary theory. He spends most of his talk noting the similarities between neoclassical economics and the Dawkins view of evolution, praising it. Except of course at the end he notes that it does not always work, and the messier, non-Dawkins stories are sometimes better. Duh.
Sure, there are some people who really dislike Gould (Dawkins, Dennett, and some others) who will make these statements about Gould not being respected by other evolutionary theorists. But his main idea, punctuated equilibrium, has entered the textbooks and is more studied and discussed than ever. Sorry, this is just whinging by the jealous or those who deeply disagree with him (Dawkins especially).
Oh, and as for me being taken in by bluffs, well, I have written on this stuff and have cited Williams, Hamilton, Maynard Smith, and numerous others, beyond those that Krugman claims are not cited by evolutionary economists, as well as Eldredge and Gould.
Finally, I have actually spoken with some of the most senior and distinguished evolutionary theorists, including some now dead. While Gould is often treated with some bemusement for his celebrity and eccentricities and the peculiar evolution of his views, I have not found these people viewing him as worthless or as having a rep worth mud. This is just silly bilge and drivel.
Finally, I would recommend you read Chapter 9 (I know, it is almost 300 pages long) of Gould’s magnum opus. He does an excellent job of covering most of these controversies, with a fair amount of mea culpas for some of his own misstatements over the years. A lot more fair-minded than the junk in your post or in your links, frankly.
Hopefully Anonymous,
That is according to US based bond raters. A lot of people think there is politics in that. Do you really think the US government is more reliable about paying back its bonds than the Japanese one? Really?
Eliezer,
What is ironic about this posting is your indignation. Offhand it sounds like you are as guilty as those you criticize.
There is nothing weird about people finding a theory to be weird that does not correspond with their everyday surface perceptions, even when they are able to comprehend it intellectually. Also, and others have noted this more or less, there are a lot of different interpretations out there of what quantum physics “really means,” and some are a lot weirder than others. Is it ontological that Schrodinger’s Cat does not either exist or not exist until actually observed being one (or not) being the other?
And again, I remind all that we do not have the definite answer on how to put quantum mechanics and general relativity together, leaving some doubt about some fundamental aspects of both. Some of the proposed resolutions are perceived by many as even weirder than either, e.g. string theory, but given that it has neither been proven nor disproven, should we all get on a big high horse about people who find string theory to be “weird”? There have just been some pretty intelligent books out criticizing it, with some of their arguments in some sense coming down to how weird it is, although that is not the terminology used.
Maybe when we finally figure all this out, if we do, quantum physics might be redone in a way that makes it seem “less weird” than it does now (and again, some of its most extreme apparent “weirdness” comes from some interpretations of it that are not universally accepted).
Ah, but A is still A, no matter what any of you may say… :-).
Douglas Knight,
There is an older literature for sure, but it was largely dismissed during the heyday of the rational expectations revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. The first break was the presidential speech to the American Finance Association in 1985 by Fischer Black, pubbed in 1986 in the Journal of Finance as “Noise,” followed by the 1987 stock market crash, and then a pair of rigorous papers in 1990 and 1991 in the QJE and Journal of Business by the formidable quartet of Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence Summers, and Robert Waldmann. They in particular argued that a rational trader must take into account the beliefs and actions of the noise traders, which can then get one into the realm of the old problem, going back to Keynes, of self-fulfilling prophecies. The issue is not false beliefs, it is understanding that the market may be driven by people who are not following long-run fundamentals and taking accurate advantage of their behavior. It is a matter of accurately forecasting a market, in the case of a bubble, accurately forecasting the path of the bubble, and those who do so can and will make more money than the safe, fundamentalist trader who stays away from the bubble.
Well, the “does a tree make a sound when it falls in the forest with nobody there to hear it?” question is really about a different issue than this matter of what is the truth-value of dictionary definitions of words. When Bishop Berkeley posed that original question and said “no,” he was asserting an idealistic philosophical perspective that I doubt few of the readers of this blog are particularly sympathetic with, although a lot of mathematician readers are probably bigger Platonists than they might be willing to admit (Did you “discover” that proof?).
Regarding dictionaries and common usage and Caterpillar assertions of “I can make a word mean whatever I want it to mean,” well, certainly dictionaries do ultimately simply report reasonably common usages, with the possibility of these simply expanding for any given word. Most of the time these new usages simply evolve in spontaneous and oddly linked ways through similarities between the newer and the older usages.
Things get a bit odd when we have consciously made changes of meaning a la the Caterpillar. Sometimes these are ironic or hip or whatever, often playing off or against an established meaning ironically. This can lead to confusion if the new meaning gets added on with the older ones, especially if the new meaning is somehow logically or factually at odds with older meanings. This means that users of the word will have to be careful about contexty and audience, if they wish to avoid confusion. Sometimes this is conscious, such as “bad” meaning “really coolly good,” although I doubt that usage has made it to the OED, if it ever will. Others with deeper historical roots are mysteries. Thus, why do both “inflammable” and “flammable” mean the same thing? And then we have words that have evolved to mean just the opposite of their original meaning, such as “pretty,” whose Old English root, “praetig,” apparently meant more like “ugly,” although I may be slightly off on that one. But, such cases are definitely out there. Should the original person to use some form of “pretty” to mean what it does today have been punished, and why did his or her listeners go along with such an extreme change of meaning (which probably happened sort of gradually anyway)?
I think James Bach was on the right track here, but did not take this far enough. Eliezer’s interlocuter was not able to really articulate his argument. Properly argued, probability is completely irrelevant.
So, let us contemplate the position of a serious, hard science creationist, and I hate to say it, but such people exist. So, this individual can fully agree and admit that how a given body grows and develops depends on its DNA structure, so that indeed it is not surprising that different species that appear morphologically and behaviorally to be somewhat similar, such as various canine species or feline species, or for that matter chimps and humans, even if the older creationists got all in fits about having a monkey for an uncle, and so forth, will have very similar DNA structures.
The issue then is how did this come to be. The evolutionist says that it is due to evolution from common ancestors and so forth. The scientific creationist says, “no,” this simply reflects that the intelligent designer set them up this way because DNA controls the growth of individual entities, so similar appearing and behaving species will have more similar DNA, and God (or The Intelligent Designer) made it this way fully consciously in accord with the laws of science, which presumably the same Entity is also fully aware of, whether or not this Entity in fact set up those laws his or herself.
It is well known that capable leaders consciously surround themselves with advisers who hold competing views, with at least some able to tell the leader when things are not going well. We have just been seeing a counterexample of this in an important real world position for the last seven years...
OTOH, if they are creationists who have been reading too much Stephen Jay Gould, who knows what sorts of trouble they might get into. They might even tragically start selecting partners on multi-levels, while disobeying the correct equations, :-).
Hmmm, well there is an endogeneity problem in that the believability of the police commissioner’s statement depends on the degree to which it constitutes legal evidence. To the extent it constitutes legal evidence, it may be less believable precisely because this give police commissioners power that they may be exercising in corrupt and power-hungry ways. A statement that cannot be seen to potentially provide some personal gain to the person making it presumably has greater credibility.
Although it is almost always the case, I can imagine legal evidence that is not necessarily scientific. The problem in my mind is precisely this bad memory of witnesses problem. I guess we have to say that an eye witness account, under oath, is “scientific.” It certain is legal evidence, although potentially challangeable by countervailing testimony or evidence. However, a scientist might be more willing to be skeptical, e.g. all those alien encounter accounts that are being discussed in other postings.
BTW, in regard to an earlier thread by Eliezer, of course “norm” does have various mathematical meanings, including the length of a vector (or multi-dimensional equivalent of “absolute value”), and there is the process of “renormalization” in algebra, which has some importance in several theories of physics. However, I remain unconvinced that any of these play an important role in establishing the earlier argument.
Stuart Armstrong,
I think you are way overstating things. Did you read earlier comments? Are you aware how close we came to defaulting in the 1990s when Congress and the president gridlocked over a budget? We have a systemic setup in contrast with all those countries with parliamentary systems that could let it happen much more easily with nothing near some kind of horrendous catastrophe. And if we began to experience some kind of serious pressure from a foreign creditor, China anyone? on top of some internal deep conflict and economic problems (and US politics is not all polarized, now is it?), it could happen.
Regarding this business of the foreign creditors, there is an important reason why most Americans simply pay no attention to our mounting foreign indebtedness: up until now the that humongoug foreign net indebtedness has not resulted in a noticeable net deficit on the investment income part of the current account part of the US international balance of payments. However, as that foreign net indebtedness increases, this will inevitably change. When we start to see several hundred billions of dollars flowing on net overseas as interest on that debt, and the accompanying upward pressure on US interest rates start to negatively impact the US economy, there might even be an outright move to do what Argentina did to our bankers, and what New York state did to British bankers back in the nineteenth century regarding the debts for financing the Erie Canal construction: consciously default.
The bottom line on why we even fuss about the “risk-free rate” is that it is a necessary input to the standard formuli for pricing all kinds of options and derivatives via Black=Scholes and its variations. Something has to go in there, even if the wise really do understand that the underlying asset on which that rate is based is not really so risk free after all.
But I am deeply dishonored, having turned out to be the dead Schrodinger’s Cat.
“Yes,” if Schrodinger’s Cat is found to be dead; “no” if it is found to be alive.
Gotta have that continuous support too, which is the real key to converging on a cycle rather than a point.
In the fuzzier world of not a definite for-real underlying distribution, I note that multiple equilibria or basins in dynamical systems can give the multi-modality that within a herding framework can lead to some sort of cycle in bouncing back and forth between the dominant states.
Rather than some blowup like al Qaeda smuggling in nukes, a more likely scenario would be something much more mundane and stupid, e.g. a political gridlock between the President and the Congress, as happened briefly back in the 90s between Clinton and the Newt Gingrich-led House. Various government activities were shut down. It never got far enough to lead to not paying interest on the national debt, but it would not take all that much more of a conflict to do it, especially if we had pressure from abroad, with our humongous foreign debt. It has long been a ridiculous joke that Moody’s downgraded the quality of Japanese bonds, when they sit on nearly $1 trillion in forex reserves, while US securities get top rating, while the US owes over $3 trillion abroad, a substantial chunk of that to the Japanese.